Network Automation & Design

Ajay Divakaran

You say 4 billion addresses. I say its less than the 7 billion people on our planet. And welcome to the internet-of-things. If you add up everything on the planet that would need an IP by the end of the decade, 7 billion wont cut it either.

Network architects often seem to be at a loss for words when asked to describe Network Automation. This is understandable though. Automation is a broad subject. From provisioning, to telemetry and monitoring, there are several faces to automation.

Ever since I’d moved my hosting from vanilla EC2 to docker, I’d been getting plagued by timeouts between NGINX and php-fpm. At first, the issue appeared to be on the fpm side, as these NGINX error-logs showed.

These days, however, my first few interview questions are usually about Automation, and conceptualization of a Network as a data model. After all, Routing protocols are just software implementation of some algorithm on steroids.

BulkWalk methods are missing from native python-bindings for net-snmp. By creating a wrapper around the GetBulk method instead, and maintaining state while traversing the oid-tree, fastsnmpy provides a clever solution

Being that this is the year of SDN, and very few people can refrain from tossing in some kind of SDN related acronym at every meeting, I decided to take a break from the SDN chit-chat and delve into pure networking for a bit (if thats even possible.)
Perhaps I’ll go for a certification, or two.